10

TOP THINGS

1 THERE IS NOT ONE,

BUT FOUR INDIAS TO KNOW
ABOUT INDIA
IN THE
“The first and most essential thing
to learn about India,” declared a
famous British administrator in

TWENTY-FIRST
1888, is “that there is not, and never
was an India, or even any country of

CENTURY
India, possessing, according to Euro-
pean ideas, any sort of unity, physical, Mountain High Maps ®
©1995 Digital Wisdom, Inc.
political, social or religious.” The state- 1

ment sounds startlingly silly until one

BY AINSLIE EMBREE
notices the defining clause, “according to
European ideas.” Then one can change it to
read, “One of the most essential things to learn about India is to not
try to fit it into a European idea of what is essential for India.” Con-
fusion arises because the term “India” has been used, by both for- tance is only part of the territorial India
eigners and Indians, for four quite different entities. India is, first of that had been ruled by Britain, it claims

Source: Cultural Atlas of India by Gordon Johnson. ©1996 by Andromeda Oxford limited.
all, a geographic term for the subcontinental region demarcated by as its historical inheritance the civiliza-
the great sweep of hills and mountains from the northwest on the tions, cultures, and political states that
Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal on the northeast, and bordered on have flourished in the region for millen-
two sides by those seas and the Indian Ocean. The ancient litera- nia. Here is the source of tensions and
ture makes clear its passions in relations with Pakistan, the
people were aware of other successor state of imperial India, in
this distinctive, well- quarrels over its sovereignty in Kashmir
defined land mass. and with China over other border areas in
But India and the Northeast. Probably most important
Indian refer to anoth- for the future, however, is the claim
er India, to a civiliza- made by powerful groups in contempo-
Eighteenth-century manuscript of the Rig Veda. The Rig tion and its cultural rary India that Indian nationalism must
Veda was composed before 1200 BCE.
Source: India: Belief and Ritual, the Gods and the Cosmos, Meditation and the components—reli- be defined in terms of the second India,
Yogic Arts by Richard Waterstone. ©1995 by Duncan Baird Publishers.
gion, philosophy, art, of the culture that was indigenous to the
literature—that through the centuries has flourished in the region Symbol of the Republic of region, which they define as Hindutva,
called Bharat in the ancient literature. It was the civilization of many India adopted in 1948. the culture of Hindu India.

2
kingdoms and empires from Kashmir to Tamilnadu, but was not
exclusively identified with any
particular one. This civilization
NARRATIVE ACCOUNTS OF INDIAN
not only dominated territorial HISTORY ARE NECESSARILY
India but was exported CONFUSING AND MISLEADING
throughout Asia, especially
Southeast Asia. Then India is The peoples of India have always reflected on their past, their
used for a third India, best social origins, and their history in ways of fundamental importance
known to the Western world for understanding intellectual and social ideas. These ways, howev-
from the empire established in er, did not always conform to western—nor, it should be noted, to
the subcontinent by Great Chinese or Islamic—historiography. What confused Europeans
Britain at the end of the eigh- when they began studying Indian culture—and Indians who used
teenth century, although the the methodologies of modern European scholarship—was that
East India Company Coat of Arms
Source: The East India Company: Trade and Conquest from
word was not officially used India’s past was a living reality, the past intertwined in the present.
1600 by Antony Wild. Published by First Lyons Press, 2002. until 1833 when the East India The vast body of Indian literature, a modern Indian historian points
Company official who had been known as Governor-General of Fort out, shows how “the variety of structural forms of social relations,
William in Bengal was designated Governor-General of India by the the intricacy of their interconnections and the long course of the
British Parliament. historical evolution of these forms through social struggle” are
The fourth India is, of course, the modern nation-state which stamped on the living beliefs and practices of the people.2 Their
became independent in 1947, making using “India” for the first past, the Indianness of India, is always palpable to the people of
time the name of a sovereign state. While its geographic inheri- present day India.

7
 In the nineteenth century, the British
were fond of cataloging the benefits
their rule had brought to India: political
unification, a western legal system,
a system of university education, the
English language, modern medicine,
and modern communications.
The narrative of Indian history is also confusing because it
lacks a political core on which to base a narrative. Seven centuries
of invasions and rule by foreigners, with the accounts written by
them, made a dispiriting national narrative for generations of Indi-
ans. “Whether unintentional or not,” a British historian comment-
ed, “no greater spiritual injury can be done to a people than to teach
them to despise the achievements of their forefathers. To overvalue
them can hardly be a mistake.”3 The evaluation of the past was a
critical project for modern India, and to a very considerable extent,
the Indian nationalist movement involved the appropriation of the
Indian past to define the nation, the integration of India’s complex,
often contradictory, past into a national narrative.
3
THE FOREIGN CONQUESTS OF THE
INDIA SUBCONTINENT MUST BE
UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF THE SOCIAL
AND POLITICAL CONDITIONS OF BOTH
THE CONQUERED AND THE
CONQUERORS
It may seem to be stating
the obvious to argue that
the foreign conquests
in the Indian sub-
continent must be
understood in
terms of the social and
Detail from a miniature of the Babur-nama, Six-
teenth-century. National Museum of India, New political conditions of both
Delhi. Source: India and the Moghal Dynasty by Valérie Berinstain. conquered and conquerors,
©1998 Thames and Hudson Ltd., London.
but understanding many
aspects of contemporary India depend precisely on this very diffi-
cult task, not yet adequately accomplished by scholars. Popular
writing, including textbooks, newspapers, and even some scholarly
works, still use such terminology as “the invasion of India,” imply-
ing an attack on a political entity, comparable to a modern nation-
state encompassing territorial India. The familiar phrase “the
Muslim invasion of India” must also be used with extreme care for
a number of reasons. One is that there was no single state encom-
passing India, but many small kingdoms and principalities. Another
is that the term “Muslim invasion” comes freighted from the con-
temporary world with connotations: terrorism rooted in a religious
commitment to violence, a staple, unhappily, of political discourse
in the United States and India at the beginning of the twenty-first
8 EDUCATION ABOUT ASIA Volume 8, Number 3
century. The invasions were by groups of various ethnic origins
who were adherents of Islam, and were attracted by the wealth of
India. Arab traders, before they became Muslims, were active along
the Indian coast, and it was Arab Muslims from Iraq who conquered
Sind early in the eighth century. Later invaders were not Arabs, but
Turkish chieftains from Central Asia who, beginning at the end of
the tenth century, made inroads into North India, and by the middle
of the fourteenth century had spread throughout much of India. The
interest of these chieftains was the collection of revenue from the
Indian peasants and merchants, not their conversion to Islam,
although many thousands of the local people became its adherents.
After centuries of Muslim rule, the population of India
remained overwhelmingly Hindu, and trade, commerce, and the
banking system were largely in the hands of Hindus, as was much
of the bureaucracy. The next major intruders, the British, came not
as an invading force sent by a nation, but as a group of traders, the
East India Company, eager to make money. While it began trading
in 1600, the East India Company did not become a political power
in India until 1765 when it gained control of the revenues of Ben-
gal, the richest province of the Mughal empire. Great Britain was
then on the way to becoming a great industrial nation, self-confi-
dent in its military and political power. It came to an India of great
cities, well-articulated political systems, enormous agricultural
population, an ancient textile industry, large external and internal
trade, and religious and literary traditions that had developed over
the course of two thousand years. The coming together of these
two civilizations set the stage for the development of modern India
as a great nation in the twenty-first century.
4
GREAT BRITAIN IMPOSED ON INDIA
WHAT MANY INDIANS CONSIDER TO
HAVE BEEN AN OPPRESSIVE POLITICAL
AND ECONOMIC SYSTEM, BUT INDIANS APPRO-
PRIATED AND ADAPTED WHAT THEY NEEDED
FROM THE WEST
In the nineteenth century, the British were fond of cataloging the
benefits their rule had brought to India: political unification, a
western legal system, a system of university education, the English
language, modern medicine, and modern communications. This is
more or less true in a formal sense, but it conceals what is of funda-
mental importance, namely, that the traditional Indian elites, work-
ing within the British system, appropriated what they needed for
their own purposes. The most familiar example of this is the eager-
ness with which the Indian upper classes and upper castes adopted
Western learning through the medium of English. The decision was
made in 1835 that government support for higher education would
go only to institutions that used English, and, from the very begin-
ning, many members of the elite saw the advantage English gave
them to acquire the learning of the West. From this followed quick
access to the great institutions of the modern world—the press,
new professions, ideas of constitutional government, representative
political institutions, science and technology, new industries. Study
of this complex process of exchange and transformation is vital for
understanding the nature of contemporary India.
Winter 2003
5 THERE WAS NOT ONE BUT MANY
INDIAN NATIONALIST MOVEMENTS

In our teaching and writing we tend to speak of the “Indian nation-

alist movement,” because of the organizational dominance of the
Indian National Congress after its founding in 1885, which
expressed itself in the idiom of contemporary British liberalism.
This success of the Congress masked, however, that there were at
least four other important strands in the opposition to British rule,
all of which have been central to India’s political discourse since
Independence.
One early challenge from Muslim leaders was that majority
rule meant the denial of the right of groups to express their social
and religious values through political structures. This challenge led
to the creation of Pakistan in 1947. In direct opposition to this posi-
tion was the demand, always present among the membership of the
The most controversial questions in
modern South Asian history have
to do with the reasons for the Partition
of what I have called the “third India,”
that is, British India, that led to the
creation of two new nations, India
and Pakistan, and eventually to a
third, Bangladesh.
power to transform India’s political and economic life, making it
into a powerful nation. So it is possible to argue that if Nehru and
the other Congress leaders had not been so intransigent, India could
have remained undivided.

7
Indian National Congress, that Hindu culture must be the basis of
Indian nationalism. A third strand in the opposition to British rule
was linked to claims from regional groups, such as the Tamils in
FIVE GREAT COMMITMENTS OF THE
South India, that they represented a culture different from that of NEHRU YEARS (1947–54) EXPRESSED
the Indians from North India who were dominant in the Indian INDIA’S HOPES FOR THE FUTURE
National Congress. This sub-nationalism did not deny the primacy
of the Indian nation but insisted on the recognition of linguistic, In a speech to the Con-
religious, and historical differences. Then there were groups, not stituent Assembly in
very vocal before independence, but increasingly afterwards, that 1946, on the eve of
argued for regional self-determination, claiming they had never becoming the first prime
been integrated into Indian empires, neither Mughal nor British. minister of independent
The so-called tribal people in the Northeast became spokesmen for India, Jawaharlal Nehru
the right of self-determination, along with groups in Kashmir and stated his certainty that
Punjab. Much of the politics of contemporary India reflects these India would advance “in
divergent nationalisms. spite of obstructions and
difficulties, and achieve

6
THE PARTITION OF INDIA IN 1947
MIGHT HAVE BEEN AVOIDED
The most controversial questions in modern South Asian history
have to do with the reasons for the Partition of what I have called
the “third India,” that is, British India, that led to the creation of
two new nations, India and Pakistan, and eventually to a third,
Bangladesh. Could it have been avoided or was it inevitable? Who
was primarily responsible? An immense literature, scholarly and
popular, gives passionate and contradictory answers to these ques-
tions; but it seems possible that Partition might have been avoided
if Nehru and the other leaders of the Indian National Congress had
been more accommodating to M. A. Jinnah, leader of the Muslim
League, more understanding of the demand that the rights of
groups, not just of the majority, must be recognized. It is not cer-
tain what Jinnah would have settled for, but he might have accept-
ed a constitutional arrangement that established states with strong
powers and a central government that was relatively weak, con-
cerned mainly with defense, foreign affairs, and currency. Nehru
and the leaders of the Indian National Congress, however, wanted
above all else a strong central government that would have the
and realize the dream that
we have dreamed so
long.”4 In the following
years, in the Constitution
that was adopted in 1950
and in subsequent amend-
ments, through acts of
Nehru on the cover of Time, December 14, 1956.
parliament, and through a
multitude of books and speeches, Nehru and those who followed
him gave expression to those dreams and tried to achieve them.
They can be fairly summarized under five terms that are empha-
sized in the Constitution and a sixth that has certainly found fre-
quent authoritative expression in other ways.
The Preamble to the Constitution, as amended in 1976,
declares that the people of India have given to themselves “A Sov-
ereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic” that assures “the
unity and integrity of the Nation.” All of the terms relate, directly
and indirectly, to the historical experience of the four Indias men-
tioned above. Some of them have been widely accepted as defining
the nature of India, while others have been fiercely contested. All
that can be done here is enumerate them, with brief comments.
Sovereignty has, of course, special meaning to a people who
had lost it on numerous occasions to foreigners, and now is intent
on maintaining it against any attempts to diminish it. The “unity of

9
 Who speaks for India? This was an
urgent domestic question throughout
the twentieth century as Indians
increasingly began to speak of
independence and freedom from
British rule. By 1946 it was clear the
Indian National Congress spoke for
the majority of Indians, but not for most
of the vast Muslim minority.
India” is one of the most frequently used phrases in political dis-
course in India, with historic memories of how disunity made
possible foreign conquest. The commitment to the practice of
democracy has been demonstrated in elections which have been
remarkably free of corruption in comparison with almost all other
recently-decolonized countries. These three commitments have
been widely accepted without much overt opposition.
The decision to declare a “socialist” country was done by a
constitutional amendment in 1976. That a so seemingly momen-
tous change was made without great opposition suggests that it was
not intended to bring about the sweeping redistribution of wealth
and power of the kind that took place in other socialist countries. In
general, what was meant by socialism was, first of all, social justice
for India’s poverty-stricken masses, and the conviction of Nehru
and others that this could only be obtained by central planning and
government control of the economy. Much of the criticism of
Nehru’s policies, now widespread in India, has been directed at this
state planning of the economy. There has, however, been no formal
attempt to delete “socialist” from the Constitution as a defining
characteristic of the Indian nation.
Secularism, the fifth of the great Nehruvian commitments, in
Indian constitutional usage does not carry as its primary dictionary
meaning indifference to religion or antagonism to its beliefs. The
word was added to the Preamble of the Constitution in 1976, but it
was implicit in the articles in the original version of 1950, guaran-
teeing freedom of religion and declaring that the state would not
support any particular religion and that all religions would be equal
before the law. Christians, Muslims, and other minority religious
groups were in favor of these clauses as they gave them the right to
freely practice and propagate their faiths, but the constitutional
guarantees also seemed to a great many Hindus, perhaps the major-
ity, to express fundamental Indian attitudes towards religion.
For members of all communities, the clauses seemed to promise
relief from the communal strife between Hindus and Muslims. The
opposition to secularism came, as noted later in number nine, from
proponents of Hindu nationalism.
The sixth of the great commitments that defines India in the
twenty-first century is that India must find the place that she
deserves in the world community, not the one that foreign rulers
previously assigned her. This conviction does not find a specific
constitutional statement, but is surely implied in the Directive Prin-
10 EDUCATION ABOUT ASIA Volume 8, Number 3
ciple that declares India would “promote peace and international
security.”5 Nehru’s ambition was to make India the spokesman for
what became known as the “Third World,” or the countries emerg-
ing from European control in Asia and Africa. Especially in the
United Nations, India’s representatives became the champion of
anti-imperialism, denouncing the old imperial powers: Great
Britain, France, and Portugal, as well as what they regarded as the
new imperialism of the United States. The Soviet Union was seen
as India’s ally in this struggle.
8
MAHATMA
GANDHI IS
AN ICON FOR
INDIA AS A NATION
Outsiders often ask about the
relevance of Gandhi and his
message for the India of the
twenty-first century, with the
world’s fourth largest army,
nuclear weapons, an industri-
alized, capitalist economy,
and a consumer society that
models itself on the United
States. India also has a stag- Gandhi greeting the crowds in Madras, 1946.
Source: Gandhi by Peter Rühe, ©2001 Phaidon Press Limited.
gering burden of poverty and
has experienced riots in which thousands of people have been
killed in the name of religion. All of this suggests that Gandhi, the
apostle of peace and non-violence, of compassion for the poor, of
simplicity in life-styles, no longer has influence. How can he be an
icon for India as a nation? An icon is, literally, a pictorial represen-
tation used to center one’s attention during religious devotions.
Gandhi is not an icon in that sense, although there are many thou-
sands of statues of him throughout India and one in the heart of
Washington, DC. He is an icon for India in the sense that he is
remembered for what he did to make India into a free and vibrant
nation, not for teachings that Indians know and follow. He is also
an icon for India in another, and very modern, sense. An icon on a
computer desktop suggests the availability of a function, but its rel-
evance depends on the knowledge and needs of the user, not on the
function itself. This is not a bad paraphrase of what Gandhi meant
when he said to his people: “Deluded by modern western civiliza-
tion, we have forgotten our ancient civilization and worship the
might of arms.”6
9
HINDU NATIONALISM CLAIMS TO BE
THE AUTHENTIC VOICE OF INDIA FOR
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Who speaks for India? This was an urgent domestic question
throughout the twentieth century as Indians increasingly began to
speak of independence and freedom from British rule. By 1946 it
was clear the Indian National Congress spoke for the majority of
Indians, but not for most of the vast Muslim minority. After inde-
pendence, the Congress claim to speak for India became less and
Winter 2003
less tenable, especially as noted in number seven of Top Ten
Things, by those critical of its commitment to secularism.
The opponents of secularism have formed organizations,
notably the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishva
Hindu Parishad (VHP), that have been successful in winning sup-
port in many segments of society. This indicates the superior orga-
nizational skills of their leaders, as well as their ability to articulate
an appealing version of the nationalist project, which they can
translate into electoral support and mobilization of crowds to
demonstrate and, very frequently, to take violent action.
Recognition of the political importance of the RSS began with
the strong showing in electoral contests made in the 1950s and
1960s by the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a political party that drew
many leaders from the RSS. Its role in Indian politics increased
with the formation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the succes-
sor of the Jana Sangh. Its success is indicated by electoral statistics:
in the elections of 1984, it won two seats; in 1991, it won 122; and
in 1998 it became the major party in India’s ruling coalition. The
RSS and its membership could now truly claim that its nationalist
project had become central in the mainstream of India’s political
discourse.
Hindu nationalism rejects the central tenet of secularism that
religion is a private matter. “We make war or peace, engage in arts
and crafts, amass wealth and give it away—indeed we are born and
die—all in accord with religious injunctions.”7 The success of the
RSS depends, to a considerable extent, upon the skillful appeal to
the greatness of India’s past, real or imagined, and the conditions,
again, real or imagined, of the contemporary world. There is little
question that Hindu nationalism will remain a major force in Indian
social and political life.
10
INDIA HAS A STRONG CIVIL
SOCIETY THAT HELPS TO ASSURE
ITS DEMOCRATIC FUTURE
The last of my Top Ten Things, while based on the historical
analyses attempted in the other nine, moves to the uncertain ground
of forecasting the future. There has been much internal violence in
India in the years since Independence, but not only has the nation
survived, it has been governed by democratically elected govern-
ments; it has fought wars with two of its neighbors, Pakistan and
China; it has faced internal uprisings in Kashmir, Punjab, and the
Northeast; it has endured horrendous religious riots; it has suffered
from the natural disasters of earthquakes and famines.
That India has not only survived all these shocks and traumas
but emerged a strong and vibrant state has been explained in many
ways, but the general explanation seems to be that even before
Independence, India had a functioning civil society and that this
has been greatly strengthened through years. Civil society is under-
stood, in broadest terms, as an autonomous arena free from state
control, sometimes cooperating with the state but often in opposi-
tion or in rivalry with some of the state’s functions as it defines
public issues and defends its autonomy. While many of the institu-
tions of civil society have immediate links with institutions in the
Western world, they are deeply embedded in the indigenous social
structures and historical experiences of the South Asian subconti-
nent.8 Science, technology, communications, and democracy
should not be seen as artifacts of the West, but the common inheri-
tance of the modern world. The Internet, so ubiquitous in modern
India, is a familiar example as is the Indian cinema, so often
deplored by Indian intellectuals for distorting the realities of mod-
ern India. M. V. Kamath, the well-known journalist, makes a
cogent argument, however, that the cinema is peculiarly Indian,
cutting across class and regional differences, giving access to the
principles by which the society “attempts to organize and concep-
tualize its experience.”9 Broadly speaking, the development of
democracy in India is closely related to activities of civil society,
for while civil society may exist to some degree in a non-democrat-
ic political order, democracy surely cannot exist, in India or any-
where, without the activities of civil society. These activities
include, in no particular order, social service organizations, orga-
nized sports, aspects of popular culture such as the cinema and tele-
vision, the print media, business and labor movements, women’s
movements, human rights groups, non-governmental organizations
both indigenous and foreign, the activities of religious groups,
environmental concerns, cultural and educational enterprises, and,
very significantly, the project of nationalism itself as nurtured by
groups belonging to civil society as it merges with the political
sphere.
The nature of civil society in India, along with the other Top
Things, seems to justify the conclusion that democracy in India is
firmly established and that India will be both a free country and a
great one in the twenty-first century. n
NOTES
1. Sir John Strachey, India (London: Kegan Paul, 1888), 1–8.
2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial His-
tories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 168.
3. E. B. Havell, quoted in A. L. Basham, “Modern Historians of Ancient India,” in
C. H. Philips, editor, Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (London: Oxford
University Press, 1961), 273.
4. Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence and After (New Delhi: Government of India,
1949), 348.
5. Constitution of India, Party IV, art. 51.
6. Quoted in Stephen Hay, editor, vol. 2, Sources of Indian Tradition (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988), 265.
7. M. S. Gowalkar, We, or Our Nation Defined (Nagpur: M. N. Kale, 1947), 28.
8. A discussion of this point is found in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani, editors,
Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001).
9. M. V. Kamath, “The Indian Ethos,” in Film India (New Delhi: Directorate of
Film Festivals, 1981), 31–32.
AINSLIE EMBREE is Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University. He
served as director of the undergraduate programs in both Asian civilizations
and Western civilization. He was President of the American Institute of Indi-
an Studies and of the Association for Asian Studies. He taught in India from
1948 to 1958 and has served in the American Embassy in Delhi. His books
include India’s Search for National Identity, Imagining India, and Religion and
Nationalism in India. He edited the Encyclopedia of Asian History, Sources of
Indian Tradition and, with Carol Gluck, Asia in Western and World History. He
contributed a chapter to Asia in the Undergraduate Curriculum, edited by
Suzanne Barnett and Van Symons.
11